The ex-HFT quants and Coinbase veterans that bet early on crypto's 26-year-old wonderkid
Overnight success rarely happens overnight; in the case of Shayne Coplan and his crypto startup Polymarket, it's been a long time in the making. The firm allows users to bet on current events, which it in turn uses to predict the probability of certain results. Scarily correct predictions in the US election this week have brought it fully mainstream.
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Coplan was a very young, very early crypto adopter, buying Ethereum at 14 before Sam Bankman-Fried had even joined Jane Street. Polymarket wasn't his first startup, either; he previously had a one called TokenUnion, focused on letting people earn interest on cryptocurrency. He publicly spoke about prediction markets as early as 2019, and opened Polymarket a year later.
Very quickly, Polymarket got its first funding round, raising $4m. The firm surely has a big shiny valuation in the future, capitalizing on its current momentum; these early investors are set to make a lot of money, but who are they?
VC firm Polychain Capital was one of Polymarkets earliest funders. It's ran by Olaf Carson-Wee, formerly the first employee of Coinbase at age 24, and its head of risk. Early funding was also led by Naval Ravikant, founder of angel investment infrastructure fintech AngelList, and one of the earliest crypto hedge fund managers with MetaStable Capital.
Plenty of others angel invested and are set to reap the rewards. Included in these is Tarun Chitra; he joined hedge fund D.E. Shaw as a graduate and spent five years there, then another two as a quant researcher at HFT firm Vatic investments before quitting for crypto. He now runs crypto economic scaling firm Gauntlet.
Other investors include Jack Herrick, founder of WikiHow, and Marc Bhargara, another Coinbase alum and MD at crypto VC firm General Catalyst.
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